The Book You Have to Read: “Confess, Fletch,” by Gregory Mcdonald

(Editor’s note: This is the 181st installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books. It comes from Tim Maleeny, the multiple award-winning author of the Cape Weathers mysteries, which include Stealing the Dragon, Boxing the Octopus, and his latest, a global art heist called Hanging the Devil. He lives and writes in New York City. His last piece for The Rap Sheet looked at Ross Thomas’ 1978 novel, Chinaman’s Chance.)

Many readers of this site are probably familiar with the character Irwin Maurice Fletcher, or Fletch to his friends, from having seen two Chevy Chase movies in the ’80s, or perhaps from watching last year’s Confess, Fletch, a comedy-drama starring Jon Hamm in the titular role that is currently streaming on television.

All three movies are fun, and Hamm isn’t bad casting for the character, but none of the films comes close to capturing the lyrical genius of the Fletch novels written by the late Gregory Mcdonald. If you’re a mystery fan, you owe it to yourself to pick up one of these books, arguably the smoothest, fastest, and most delightful whodunits ever written.

As with any great crime series, you can read the Fletch novels as standalones in whatever order you wish. The first one, Fletch (1974), and its sequel, Confess, Fletch (1976), both picked up Edgar Awards (for best first novel and best paperback original, respectively)—back-to-back wins that stand unmatched.

Sometimes a movie can amplify reader interest in a book, but when a movie gets mass distribution and is produced after a series has ended, often the source material is eclipsed in the public consciousness. In the case of Mcdonald, all the Fletch books are still in print, so here’s hoping the renewed film interest will put them back in a place of prominence on bookstore shelves.

Plotted with the precision of a Sherlock Holmes puzzle and written with the commanding cool of an Elmore Leonard heist, the Fletch stories almost seem effortless to the reader, but are a masterclass in plotting, pacing, and dialogue.

Recently I reread Confess, Fletch because that second novel finds Fletch, formerly an investigative journalist, moving up in the world and working as an art critic. I had finished writing a novel of my own about art theft, forgery, and museum heists, and knowing I’d be asked about art mysteries when my book hit the shelves this year, I decided to read and reread any novels dealing with the art world. (A big topic we’ll save for another column.) Though I’d read all the Fletch novels before, after one chapter into Confess, Fletch, I was once again stunned by the speed at which the story unfolds.

There are a handful of writers who turn dialogue into action, using any verbal exchange between characters to bring tension and movement to a plot, as if the conversation was a car chase or tug-of-war. Authors such as Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas, Joe R. Lansdale, and Loren D. Estleman are deservedly admired for packing personality into every set of quotation marks.

Nobody writes dialogue better than Gregory Mcdonald, though. Somehow he manages to carry entire chapters with unattributed dialogue, the normal “Fletch said” or “she said” tags unnecessary because the back-and-forth is so tight.

In the very first chapter of this second novel, Fletch discovers a dead body in the living room of his apartment, and after placing the compulsory call to the police (which doesn’t go as you’d expect), the story takes off like a rocket. In less than 20 pages, Mcdonald introduces no fewer than five characters, including the inscrutable Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn, an Irish cop as sharp and eloquent as his prime suspect, Fletch. Although physical descriptions are minimal, the prose is so pointed, you easily visualize each character, and the banter carries a subtext that simultaneously makes you smile even as you begin to fear for the safety of your protagonist.

These books are fast, fun, and full of surprises sufficient to keep any mystery maven guessing. The writing is so clean it’s almost too easy to take the craft for granted, but the genius of Gregory Mcdonald should never be forgotten.

READ MORE: “A Final Farewell to Fletch’s Father,” by Cameron Hughes (The Rap Sheet).

The Book You Have to Read: “Chinaman’s Chance,” by Ross Thomas

(Editor’s note: This is the seventh entry in our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Tim Maleeny, author of the private investigator Cape Weathers series.)

Ross Thomas sometimes gets overlooked when people talk about masters of the genre, or he gets confused with another Ross who deserves to be on everyone’s must-read list, the great Ross Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar, but that’s another story.)

Ross Thomas, though, stands apart because he redefined the modern thriller, and the best example of his unique take on a classic form is Chinaman’s Chance (1978).

Until Thomas came along there was a clear distinction between hard-boiled mysteries and international thrillers, with little to no overlap. Thomas changed all that, bringing the moral ambiguity of a crime novel into the complicated political legacy of the post-Vietnam era.

Hard-boiled crime novels followed directly in the path carved so beautifully by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, books that lifted the veil from civilized society to expose the seedy underside of human nature. They were close-in human dramas, carried by sharp dialogue, spare descriptions, and an undercurrent of cynicism that pulled you inexorably toward an ending that resolved the mystery without fully answering the moral questions it raised.

Thrillers, by contrast, made a clear distinction between good guys and bad guys. The heroes were larger than life and the stakes high, the fate of the free world hanging precariously in the balance. Thrillers were derivative of the pulp adventures of the 1930s and ’40s. Post World War II, the stories typically featured a brave everyman or soldier-spy fighting against forces bent on the destruction of all we hold dear. The bad guys (typically Nazis) would stop at nothing, and the good guys (anyone who wasn’t a Nazi) would sacrifice everything to save the day.

But the political landscape had its own moral ambiguity beyond anything found in crime fiction when Thomas published his first novel, The Cold War Swap, in 1966. People were cynical about the notion that their government always knew what it was doing, and there was ample evidence that organizations such as the CIA might sometimes operate in a world where so-called “good guys” happened to be the people you were in bed with today, as opposed to the group holding the moral high ground.

Thomas created characters that could navigate this uncertain world effortlessly, characters so smart and likable that you often forget which side of the law they might be on. In the end you don’t really care, as long as they wind up on top, because you not only wish you were as cool, sharp, and funny as they are, but you want to believe you’re going to see them again.

The two characters in question here are Artie Wu (the “Chinaman” of the title) and his partner Quincy Durant. They’ve worked for the government at various times in their shady past, but more often than not they work for themselves. They share a history in the spy game that has given the pair their own moral compass, which never seems to waver (even though it confounds everyone around them). They are lovable rogues, and like their creator, they are masters of the long con. The plot of Chinaman’s Chance has more twists and turns than The Sting. The story begins when Artie Wu, pretender to the imperial throne of China, goes for a walk along the beach and trips on a dead pelican. This random mishap leads to a meeting with his beachfront neighbor, the “man with six greyhounds,” but it quickly becomes apparent that nothing happens by chance in the world of Artie Wu. What begins as an elaborate confidence scam turns into a murder investigation when Artie, Quincy, and their grifter pal Otherguy Overby are hired to find a missing folk singer suspected of killing her boyfriend--who just happens to have been a highly influential U.S. senator. The pace is lightning-fast as the plot turns in on itself, each bend revealing another detail of these beautifully drawn characters.

Those are just some of the reasons this work and its author are significant to lovers of crime fiction, but if I were to sweep aside any academic horseshit I might have dropped along the way, I’d tell you the real reason to read this novel is that it’s an absolute delight from the first page. The dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, the plot as twisted as the characters. This book can be read more than once and never gets old.

Ross Thomas paved the way for many contemporary writers who bring velocity to their plots without losing a third dimension from their characters. If you love mysteries and thrillers and want the best of both in a single novel, pick up Chinaman’s Chance.

That’s all folks, but look for something completely different next week from the inimitable David Corbett, author of the noir classic Done for a Dime (2003) as well as the recently Edgar Award-nominated Blood of Paradise.

READ MORE: “Remembering Ross Thomas,” by Tony Hiss (The Atlantic Monthly).